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Cultivating ecosophy: a dialog with the contemporary vision fast company

by Charles Carlin

Preamble
This story begins in the Inyo mountains, an ancient range that rises up out of California’s Owens valley, marking the beginning of the seemingly endless undulations of basins and moun- tain ranges that extend all the way to the Colorado Plateau and Utah’s Wasatch Range, hundreds of miles to the east. The basins are covered in sage. As the ranges rise up, the sage gives way to pinyon-juniper forest, then white pine and bristlecones at the highest elevations. Basin, range, repeat.

Writer Mary Austin called this place the land of lost borders, a name she learned from Paiute friends. She wrote, it is a place ‘where the boundary of soul and sense is as faint as a trail in a sand-storm ... where the names mean something’ (Austin 1987, 3). For the Paiute who lived prior to white colonization, lost borders referred to how territorial boundaries between groups grew fuzzy in the desert, determined more by access to ephemeral water sources than hard territorial demarcations. Austin added another layer of psychic significance to the name as she chronicled the lives of white miners and settlers along with Paiute people adapting to life under colonization. (Read full article)

For millennia, indigenous people everywhere have known "how to die." Their teacher was the natural world and, over many years and many generations, they learned their lessons well. Cycles of dying and rebirth were seen everywhere: the setting and rising of the sun, the turning of the seasons, the death of the elderly alongside the birth of a new generation. Ceremonial rites of passage emerged pan-culturally as a means of supporting, guiding and witnessing this natural process.

Since 2014, our founder Meredith has been inviting one set of guest teachers/guides each year, from outside our country, to come to the Owen's Valley and offer a seminar that they have developed from their own cultural and personal perspective. These international teachers are people who have trained at the school and then taken what they've learned back to their own land and integrated it into their respective work there.